(upbeat techno music) >> Hey everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Snowflake Summit '22 live from Caesar's Forum in beautiful, warm, and sunny Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. I got the Chris and Chris show, next. Bear with me. Chris Degnan joins us again. One of our alumni, the Chief Revenue Officer at Snowflake. Good to have you back, Chris. >> Thank you for having us. >> Lisa: Chris Grusz also joins us. Director of Business Development AWS Marketplace and Service Catalog at AWS. Chris and Chris, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Good to be back in person. >> Isn't it great. >> Chris G: It's so much better. >> Chris D: Yeah. >> Nothing like it. So let's talk. There's been so much momentum, Chris D, at Snowflake the last few years. I mean the momentum at this show since we launched yesterday, I know you guys launched the day before with partners, has been amazing. A lot of change, and it's like this for Snowflake. Talk to us about AWS working together with Snowflake and some of the benefits in it from your customer. And then Chris G, I'll go to you for the same question. >> Chris G: Yep. >> You know, first of all, it's awesome. Like, I just, you know, it's been three years since I've had a Snowflake Summit in person, and it's crazy to see the growth that we've seen. You know, I can't, our first cloud that we ever launched on top of was, was AWS, and AWS is our largest cloud, you know, in in terms of revenue today. And they've been, they just kind of know how to do it right. And they've been a wonderful partner all along. There's been challenges, and we've kind of leaned in together and figured out ways to work together, you know, and to solve those challenges. So, been a wonderful partnership. >> And talk about it, Chris G, from your perspective obviously from a coopetition perspective. >> Yep. >> AWS has databases, cloud data forms. >> Chris G: Yeah. >> Talk to us about it. What was the impetus for the partnership with Snowflake from AWS's standpoint? >> Yeah, well first and foremost, they're building on top of AWS. And so that, by default, makes them a great partner. And it's interesting, Chris and I have been working together for, gosh, seven years now? And the relationship's come a really long way. You know, when we first started off, we were trying to sort out how we were going to work together, when we were competing, and when we're working together. And, you know, you fast forward to today, and it's just such a good relationship. Because both companies work backwards from customers. And so that's, you know, kind of in both of our DNA. And so if the customer makes that selection, we're going to support them, even from an AWS perspective. When they're going with Snowflake, that's still a really good thing for AWS, 'cause there's a lot of associated services that Snowflake either integrates to, or we're integrating to them. And so, it's really kind of contributed to how we can really work together in a co-sell motion. >> Talk to us, talk about that. The joint GOTO market and the co-selling motion from Snowflake's perspective, how do customers get engaged? >> Well, I think, you know, typically we, where we are really good at co-selling together is we identify on premise systems. So whether it's, you know, some Legacy UDP system, some Legacy database solution, and they want to move to the cloud? You know, Amazon is all in on getting everyone to the cloud. And I think that's their approach they've taken with us is saying we're really good at accelerating that adoption and moving all these, you know, massive workloads into the cloud. And then to Chris's point, you know, we've integrated so nicely into things like SageMaker and other tool sets. And we, we even have exciting scenarios where they've allowed us to use, you know, some of their Amazon.com retail data sets that we actually use in data sharing via the partnership. So we continue to find unique ways to partner with our great friends at Amazon. >> Sounds like a very deep partnership. >> Chris D: Yeah. Absolutely. >> Chris G: Oh, absolutely, yeah. We're integrating into Snowflake, and they're integrating to AWS. And so it just provides a great combined experience for our customers. And again, that's kind of what we're both looking forward from both of our organizations. >> That customer centricity is, >> Yeah. >> is I think the center of the flywheel that is both that both of you, your companies have. Chris D, talk about the the industry's solutions, specific, industry-specific solutions that Snowflake and AWS have. I know we talked yesterday about the pivot from a sales perspective >> Chris D: Yes. >> That snowflake made in recent months. Talk to us about the industries that you are help, really targeting with AWS to help customers solve problems. >> Yeah. I think there's, you know, we're focused on a number of industries. I think, you know, some of the examples, like I said, I gave you the example of we're using data sharing to help the retail space. And I think it's a really good partnership. Because some of the, some companies view Amazon as a competitor in the retail space, and I think we kind of soften that blow. And we actually leverage some of the Amazon.com data sets. And this is where the partnership's been really strong. In the healthcare space, in the life sciences space, we have customers like Anthem, where we're really focused on helping actually Anthem solve real business problems. Not necessarily like technical problems. It's like, oh no, they want to get, you know, figure out how they can get the whole customer and take care of their whole customer, and get them using the Anthem platform more effectively. So there's a really great, wonderful partnership there. >> We've heard a lot in the last day and a half on theCUBE from a lot of retail customers and partners. There seems to be a lot of growth in that. So there's so much change in the retail market. I was just talking with Click and Snowflake about Urban Outfitters, as an example. And you think of how what these companies are doing together and obviously AWS and Snowflake, helping companies not just pivot during the pandemic, but really survive. I mean, in the beginning with, you know, retail that didn't have a digital presence, what were they going to do? And then the supply chain issues. So it really seems to be what Snowflake and its partner Ecosystem is doing, is helping companies now, obviously, thrive. But it was really kind of like a no-go sort of situation for a lot of industries. >> Yeah, and I think the neat part of, you know, both the combined, you know, Snowflake and AWS solution is in, a good example is DoorDash, you know. They had hyper growth, and they could not have handled, especially during COVID, as we all know. We all used DoorDash, right? We were just talking about it. Chipotle, like, you know, like (laughter) and I think they were able to really take advantage of our hyper elastic platforms, both on the Amazon side and the Snowflake side to scale their business and meet the high demand that they were seeing. And that's kind of some of the great examples of where we've enabled customer growth to really accelerate. >> Yeah. Yeah, right. And I'd add to that, you know, while we saw good growth for those types of companies, a lot of your traditional companies saw a ton of benefit as well. Like another good example, and it's been talked about here at the show, is Western Union, right? So they're a company that's been around for a long time. They do cross border payments and cross currency, you know, exchanges, and, you know, like a lot of companies that have been around for a while, they have data all over the place. And so they started to look at that, and that became an inhibitor to their growth. 'Cause they couldn't get a full view of what was actually going on. And so they did a lengthy evaluation, and they ended up going with Snowflake. And, it was great, 'cause it provided a lot of immediate benefits, so first of all, they were able to take all those disparate systems and pull that into Snowflake. So they finally had a single source of the truth, which was lacking before that. So that was one of the big benefits. The second benefit, and Chris has mentioned this a couple times, is the fact that they could use data sharing. And so now they could pull in third data. And now that they had a holistic view of their entire data set, they could pull in that third party data, and now they could get insights that they never could get before. And so that was another large benefit. And then the third part, and this is where the relationship between AWS and Snowflake is great, is they could then use Amazon SageMaker. So one of the decisions that Western Union made a long time ago is they use R for their data science platform, and SageMaker supports R. And so it really allowed them to dovetail the skill sets that they had around data science into SageMaker. They could now look across all of Snowflake. And so that was just a really good benefit. And so it drove the cost down for Western Union which was a big benefit, but the even bigger benefit is they were now able to start to package and promote different solutions to their customers. So they were effectively able to monetize all the data that they were now getting and the information they were getting out of Snowflake. And then of course, once it was in there, they could also use things like Tableau or ThoughtSpot, both of which available in AWS Marketplace. And it allowed them to get all kinds of visualization of data that they never got in the past. >> The monetization piece is, is interesting. It's so challenging for organizations, one, to get that single source view, to be able to have a customer 360, but to also then be able to monetize data. When you're in customer conversations, how do you help customers on that journey, start? Because the, their competitors are clearly right behind them, ready to take first place spot. How do you help customers go, all right this is what we're going to do to help you on this journey with AWS to monetize your data? >> I think, you know, it's everything from, you know, looking at removing the silos of data. So one of the challenges they've had is they have these Legacy systems, and a lot of times they don't want to just take the Legacy systems and throw them into the cloud. They want to say, we need a holistic view of our customer, 360 view of our customer data. And then they're saying, hey, how can we actually monetize that data? That's where we do everything from, you know, Snowflake has the data marketplace where we list it in the data marketplace. We help them monetize it there. And we use some of the data sets from Amazon to help them do that. We use the technologies like Chris said with SageMaker and other tool sets to help them realize the value of their data in a real, meaningful way. >> So this sounds like a very strategic and technical partnership. >> Yeah, well, >> On both sides. >> It's technical and it's GOTO market. So if you take a look at, you know, Snowflake where they've built over 20 integrations now to different AWS services. So if you're using S3 for object storage, you can use Snowflake on top of that. If you want to load up Snowflake with Glue which is our ETL tool, you can do that. If you want to use QuickSite to do your data visualization on top of Snowflake, you can do that. So they've built integration to all of our services. And then we've built integrations like SageMaker back into Snowflake, and so that supports all kinds of specific customer use cases. So if you think of people that are doing any kind of cloud data platform workload, stuff like data engineering, data warehousing, data lakes, it could be even data applications, cyber security, unistore type things, Snowflake does an excellent job of helping our customers get into those types of environments. And so that's why we support the relationship with a variety of, you know, credit programs. We have a lot of co-sell motions on top of these technical integrations because we want to make sure that we not only have the right technical platform, but we've got the right GOTO market motion. And that's super important. >> Yeah, and I would add to that is like, you know one of the things that customers do is they make these large commitments to Amazon. And one of the best things that Amazon did was allow those customers to draw down Snowflake via the AWS Marketplace. So it's been wonderful to his point around the GOTO market, that was a huge issue for us. And, and again, this is where Amazon was innovative on identifying the ways to help make the customer have a better experience >> Chris G: Yeah. >> Chris D: and put the customer first. And this has been, you know, wonderful partnership there. >> Yeah. It really has. It's been a great, it's been really good. >> Well, and the customers are here. Like we said, >> Yep. >> Yes. Yes they are. >> we're north of 10,000 folks total, and customers are just chomping at the bit. There's been so much growth in the last three years from the last time, I think I heard the 2019 Snowflake Summit had about 1500 people. And here we are at 10,000 plus now, and standing-room-only keynote, the very big queue to get in, people turned away, pushed back to an overflow area to be able to see that, and that was yesterday. I didn't even get a chance to see what it was like today, but I imagine it was probably the same. Talk about the, when you're in customer conversations, where do you bring, from a GTM perspective, Where do you bring Snowflake into the conversation? >> Yeah >> Obviously, there's Redshift there, what does that look like? I imagine it follows the customer's needs, challenges. >> Exactly. >> Compelling events. >> Yeah. We're always going to work backwards from the customer need, and so that is the starting point for kindling both organizations. And so we're going to, you know, look at what they need. And from an AWS perspective, you know, if they're going with Snowflake, that's a very good thing. Right? 'Cause one of the things that we want to support is a selection experience to our AWS customers and make sure that no matter what they're doing, they're getting a very good, supported experience. And so we're always going to work backwards from the customer. And then once they make that technology decision, then we're going to support them, as I mentioned, with a whole bunch of co-sell resources. We have technical resources in the field. We have credit programs and in, you know, and, of course, we're going to market in a variety of different verticals as well with Snowflake. If you take a look at all the industry clouds that Snowflake has spun up, financial services and healthcare, and media entertainment, you know, those are all very specific use cases that are very valuable to an AWS customer. And AWS is going more and more to market on a vertical approach, and so Snowflake really just fits right in with our overall strategy. >> Right. Sounds like very tight alignment there. That mission alignment that Frank talked about yesterday. I know he was talking about that with respect to customers, but it sounds like there's a mission alignment between AWS and Snowflake. >> Mission alignment, yeah. >> I live that every week. (laughter) >> Sorry if I brought up a pain point. >> Yeah. Little bit. No. >> Guys, what's, in terms of use cases, obviously we've been here for a couple days. I'm sure you've had tremendous feedback, >> Chris G: Yeah. >> from, from customers, from partners, from the ecosystem. What's next, what can we expect to hear next? Maybe give us a preview of re:Invent in the few months. >> Preview of re:Invent. Yeah. No, well, one of the things we really want to start doing is just, you know, making the use case of, of launching Snowflake on AWS a lot easier. So what can we do to streamline those types of experiences? 'Cause a lot of times we'll find that customers, once they buy a third party solution like Snowflake, they have to then go through a whole series of configuration steps, and what can we do to streamline that? And so we're going to continue to work on that front. One of the other places that we've been exploring with Snowflake is how we work with channel partners. And, you know, when we first launched Marketplace it was really more of an app store model that was ISVs on one side and channel partners on the other, and there wasn't really a good fit for channel partners. And so four years ago we retrofitted the platform and have opened it up to resellers like an SHI or SIs like Salam or Deloitte who are top, two top SIs for Snowflake. And now they can use Marketplace to resell those technologies and also sell their services on top of that. So Snowflake's got a big, you know, practice with Salam, as I mentioned. You know, Salam can now sell through Marketplace and they can actually sell that statement of work and put that on the AWS bill all by virtue of using Marketplace, that automation platform. >> Ease of use for customers, ease of use for partners as well. >> Yes. >> And that ease of use is it's no joke. It's, it's not just a marketing term. It's measurable and it's about time-to-value, time-to-market, getting customers ahead of their competition so that they can be successful. Guys, thanks for joining me on theCUBE today. Talking about AWS and >> Nice to be back. Nice to be back in person. >> Isn't it nice to be back. It's great to be actually sitting across from another human. >> Exactly. >> Thank you so much for your insights, what you shared about the partnership and where it's going. We appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Cool. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right guys. For Chris and Chris, I'm Lisa Martin, here watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas. I'll be back with my next guest momentarily, so stick around. (Upbeat techno music)

(electronic music) >> Live, from Washington, DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back. We're here live in Washington, D.C. It's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit. It's like re:Invent but also for public sector. But it's a global public sector. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Vincent Quah, who's the head of education, nonprofits, and healthcare in Asia, Pacific, and Japan for AWS. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, John, Stu. Great to be able to be here. >> You know, we constantly talk about cloud in the United States here, and people use the word GovCloud, and Teresa and I always kind of jokingly say, "No, it's bigger than GovCloud. It's global public sector." You bring an international perspective covering APAC for AWS? >> Yes, absolutely. >> Public sector, okay. Outside of China, which is a different division with Amazon, you got the whole world. So Teresa and the team are looking not just at the US, it's the entire world. What's different? How's that working? Give us an update. >> I think one of the key differences that we see is that the US has really led the way in terms of the adoption of cloud technologies. We had great examples of universities that have really gone all in. What we are seeing now is that universities and education institutions in Asia, they're beginning to pick up their pace. And it's exciting to see some of the universities really coming very strongly using AWS. And we're seeing this across not just in mature countries and developed countries, but also in developing countries. And so it is a very widespread adoption of the cloud. And we're very excited by that. Tell us about the AWS Educate. Teresa Carlson on stage yesterday very highlighted much in her keynote about education, as well as some of the that they're doing with retraining and educating young people and whatnot, but really education has been a real growth area, from interest with cloud. Because old IT (laughs) okay, you look at that, okay, there's never had a lot of IT guys. (Vincent laughs) But it's really changed both technology procurement and delivery, but also the impact. >> Right. >> Talk about the AWS Educate program. >> So the AWS Educate program is a free program that all institutions can join. It comes with content from AWS, it comes with content from some of the top computer science universities in the world, as well as Cloud Credits, where individual student members, or the educator's members, they can actually get access to using the real platform that AWS provide. Now, this is really game-changing for students and for the institution. And it's game-changing because they have exactly the same access to all the 125-plus technologies that AWS provide to enterprises and now they are in the hands of students. So can you imagine, if they have the experience using some of these services, building capabilities, building solutions and services, and bringing out to the market. So now, innovation is in the hands of every single individual. And Educate is such an important program to re-skill and skill graduates to be ready for the working world. >> I love that, Vincent. I think back, most of my career, when you talked about education, you talked about research and universities. So it was a certain top-tier and a very limited amount. You're really democratizing what's happening. Wonder if you have any examples, or what sort of innovations are coming out of some of these global initiatives? One of the great example is NOVA, right. So we've announced that NOVA is now building this cloud associate degree as part of their information systems technology. >> What's NOVA again? >> The Northern Virginia Community College. >> In the keynote yesterday, not to be confused with Villanova, the basketball champs. >> Northern Virginia, got it, sorry. >> So, there's a need there that the institutions see because there's so much that the industry would need in terms of skills and graduates graduating with the right skill set. If you look at the World Economic Forum that was published in 2016, more about Internet and cloud computing are the two key technological drivers that's creating all these change in the industry. And many, many organizations are now investing into skilling and re-skilling. Educate sits so nicely to this particular part of the agenda. Apart from what NOVA has done here in the US, there are two other examples I want to quickly highlight to you. The first is, in the first week of June, we actually did an event in the Philippines. It was a large-scale student event. We had more than hundreds of students in a single location, with probably close to 100 educators. We took them through a four-day event. Two days of skills and content learning with hands-on experience. A third day on a gamified challenge that we put the students through so that they can compete with one another in groups, and thereby achieving top-notch scores in the leaderboard. And at the end of the day, they actually get to also develop a curriculum vitae, a CV, that they can actually submit to companies. And on the fourth day, we brought more than 20 companies as part of this whole event, and we got the students to actually connect with the companies, and the companies to the students, so that where the companies are looking for jobs, these are the students that are ready with skills that they have learned over the past three days, that they can apply to jobs that these company are looking for. So that's a really strong case of what we see working. Connecting skills to companies that are looking for students with the right set of skills. >> Talk about the international global landscape for a minute. You have a unique perspective in your job. What are the key things going on out there? What's the progress look like? What are some of the successes? Can you share a little bit about what's going on in Asia, Pacific, and Japan? >> Sure. There'll be two examples that I'll be sharing. The first is, we know that AWS Educate started off at the tertiary level. But then, last re:Invent is now being extended to 14 years and above. So now children at that age can learn about the cloud and be made aware of what's the potential of the cloud and what they can learn and use the cloud for. We've also begun to extend that work into the adult working workforce. One very specific example that I can share with you. There is an organization in Singapore called the National Trade Unions Congress LearningHub. They're an education service provider and they provide education services to citizens of Singapore. We have worked with them. They're using the AWS Educate content, and they develop two courses. Fundamentals in Cloud Computing and Fundamentals in IoT. They bring this pilot courses for the Fundamentals in IoT to a group of individuals age 45 to 74 years old. And they came away, the course just simply blew their mind away. They were so excited about what they have learned. How to program, actually, I have with me, an Internet of Things button. Now they can actually come up with an idea, program an activity on this button, so that it trigger off a particular reaction. And that's the excitement that these individuals 45 to 74 years old. They have the domain expertise, now they need is just an idea and a platform. >> It's also entrepreneurial too. >> Absolutely. >> They can tinker with the software, learn about the cloud at a very young age, and they can grow into it and maybe start something compelling, have a unique idea, fresh perspective. >> Correct. >> Or, someone who's retraining, to get a new job. >> Correct. And innovation is, we keep thinking of innovation as something that's really big. But actually, innovation doesn't have to be that way. It can start very small and then scale up from there. And all you need is just an idea to apply. >> All right. So Vincent, one of the themes we've been talking a lot about at the show is cybersecurity. Can you speak how that discussion plays specifically in the education markets? >> What we want to do is really raise the awareness of every individual's understanding of cloud computing. And by that I mean from 14 years to 74 years old. We want to let them know, actually, they are already interacting with cloud technologies. For example, if you have a Samsung Smart TV at home, if you have made a hotel booking through Expedia or through Airbnb, or if you have called for home delivery from McDonald's, you've already interacted with the cloud. And so what we want to do is make sure that everybody actually understand that. And then through some of these courses that are being provided by our partners, then they can go and learn about the security part of it. And help them have a much better sense of idea of, look, the cloud is actually a lot more secure. And we've heard many examples of that today and yesterday. And we want to give them that assurance that what they are doing and consuming, they can be part of that entrepreneur process to create something new and very exciting. >> Vincent, I'll give you the last word on this interview by sharing the update from Asia Pacific AWS. How many people are out there's a growing, you're hiring. What are some of the priorities you guys have. They have a big event in Singapore, I know that. We've been watching it, thinking about bringing theCUBE there. Give us some idea of the growth around the AWS people. What's the head count look like, give us some estimations. John, you know I can't really talk too much about head count, but I can say that we are definitely growing our AWS head count very, very rapidly. The needs and requirements out there in the market is so tremendous, and we want to be able to serve the customer as best as we can. We are a customer-obsessed company, and so we want to be there with the customer, work with them to really meet the objective and the goals that they have. And help them achieve that vision. And so we are just the enabler. We empower the customer to make. >> You have events out there too, right? You have the re:Invent, Summit? >> We have the AWS Summit, and this coming October we have the Public Sector Summit here in Singapore, as well as in Canberra in September. >> Right. >> And there's an education event coming domestically, too. >> And there's an education, a global education event that is happening in Seattle in August. So we're very excited about that. >> Lot of action on the AWS ecosystem. Congratulations, you guys do a great job. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, Vincent. Really appreciate it. We're here live in Washington, DC. It's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We've got Dave Vellante here as well, coming and joining us for some interviews. We'll be right back, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

(techno music) >> Live, from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit, 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, this is the live CUBE coverage here in Washington DC for AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. This is the, kind of like the reinvent for Public Sector. I'm John Furrier, f my co-host Stu Miniman, our next guest is Hardik Bhatt, Smart Cities Vertical Lead for Amazon Web Services, been a former CIO, knows the state and local governments cold. This is a very key area around Internet of Things and technology with cloud, because smart cities have to do not only technology roll outs for some of the new capabilities, but all manage some of the societal changes, like self-driving cars and a variety of other things, from instrumenting sensors and traffic lights and video cam ... I mean, this is a little, just a little ... Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, John. Good to see you, Stu, good morning. Looking forward to having a great conversation. >> So, smart cities obviously is really hot, but we love it, because it brings life, and work, life, and play together, because we all live in towns, and we live in cities, and the cities provide services to the residents, transportation, sidewalks, and things that we take for granted in the analog world. Now there's a whole digital set of services coming big time. So, are they prepared? (laughs) It used to be buy a mainframe, then move it to a minicomputer, get a Local Area Network, buy some PCs, buy some network tablets, now the cloud's here. What's your assessment of the smart cities landscape for state and local governments? Because it really is something that's on the front burner, in terms of figuring it out. What's the architecture? Lot of questions. What's your, what's the state of the union, if you will, for-- >> You know it has been, like, how the governments have been for many years, right? Governments exist so that they can provide better services, they can provide better quality of life, they can create an environment where businesses thrive, jobs can be created, education can be given, and you can build a workforce and talent, et cetera. And smart cities is just, I'd say, a trend where, you know, you're using multitudes of technology to kind of help the government get its mission accomplished in a smoother, faster, better, cheaper manner. And a lot of times, I've seen, because how smart cities movement started a decade ago, we kind of compare smart cities with the Internet of Things or the sensors, but smart cities is much more than just the IoT, or the Internet of Things, I mean if you're talking about creating a new stream of data that is real-time, whether coming in from sensors, coming from video, you already as a government, I used to be a CIO for the City of Chicago, we used petabytes of data that was already sitting in my data center, and then there's also this whole third-party data. So smart cities is a lot about how do you as a city are aggregating this different sources of data and then making some action from it, so that ultimately, going back to the city's priorities, you are giving better public safety, or you're providing better public health, or you're providing better education or you're providing, better providing government services. So that's what we are seeing. Our customers are, when we say smart cities, they jump right into, "What problems are you solving?" And that, to me, is the core for Amazon, core for Amazon Web Services. We want to know our customers' problems and then work backwards to solve them. >> What are some of the problems right now that are low-hanging fruit? Because obviously it's an evolution. You set the architecture up, but ultimately governments would love to have some revenue coming in from businesses. You mention that. Education is certainly there. What are some of the challenges there? Is it pre-existing stuff, or is it new opportunities? What are some of the trends you're seeing for use cases? It is actually both pre-existing stuff that they are trying to solve, as well the new stuff, the new opportunities that are getting created, because the technology is much different than what it used to be 10 years ago. The cloud, especially, is creating a lot more new opportunities, because of the nimbleness it brings, the agility it brings. So, in transportation side, we are seeing on one hand, multiple departments, multi-jurisdictional, so state transportation department, as well as a local transportation department, working together to create kind of a virtual information sharing environment or a virtual command center, so that they can detect an accident, a traffic incident, much quicker and respond to that, because now they can aggregate this data. And they're also now adding to that some public safety information. So whether it is a police department, fire department, EMS, so that they can address that incident quickly and then not only clear the traffic and clear the congestion, or reduce the congestion time, but they can also address the, any public safety issue that may have arisen out of that incident that has happened. So, the Department of Transportation, the USDOT, through the Federal Highway Administration, has been giving out $60 million worth of grants to six to ten recipients. The grant, this year's grant period, just closed on Monday, and we worked with multiple customers who are looking to kind of respond to that. So on one hand, it is that. So this is an age-old problem, but new technology can help you solve that. On the other hand, another customer that we worked with is looking for on-demand micro-transit solutions. As you can see, all the ride-sharing applications are making easier to jump in a car and move to one place to the other. It is causing a dip in transit ridership. So the public transit agents, they are looking for solutions to that. So they are looking at, "Can we build an on-demand microtransit "so you can pool your friends and jump into a transit van, as opposed to a private car?" And then you can go from point A to point B in a much more affordable manner. So they are looking at that. On the public health side, you know, we have the DC Benefits Exchange, Health Benefits Exchange, is on AWS, and they have seen significant savings. They have seen $1.8 million of annual savings because they are using cloud and cloud services. On the other hand, you have State of Georgia, which is using Alexa. So they have built Alexa Skills where you can ask, as a resident of State of Georgia getting SNAP benefit, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance, the food-stamp program, you can say, "Alexa, what's my SNAP balance?" So based on the answer then, based on the balance you know, you can plan your, you know, where you're going to use that money. So we are seeing large volume of data now coming on the cloud where the governments are looking to move kind of the needle. We are also seeing this nimble, quick solutions that can start going out. And we are seeing a lot of driver behind the innovation is our City on a Cloud challenge. So we have seen the City on a Cloud winners, since last so many years, are kind of the ones who are driving innovation and they're also driving a lot of collaboration. So I can, there are three trends that I can jump into as we kind of talk more. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think back a decade ago, when you talk smarter cities, you'd see this video, and it would look like something out of a science fiction. It's like, you know, "Oh, the flying taxi'll come, "and it will get you and everything." But what I, the stories I have when I talk to CIOs in cities and the like, it's usually more about, it's about data. It's about the underlying data, and maybe it's a mobile app, maybe it's a thing like Alexa Skills. So help us understand a little bit, what does the average citizen, what do they see? How does their, you know, greater transparency and sharing of information and collaboration between what the agencies are doing and, you know, the citizenship. >> I think that's a great question. I mean that is what, as a former CIO, I always had to balance between, what I do creates internal government efficiency, but the citizens don't feel it, don't see it, they don't, it doesn't get in the news media. And on the other hand, I also have to, to my governor, to my mayor, to the agency directors, have to give them visible wins. So, I'll give you an example, so City of Chicago, back in the day, in 2010 when I was the CIO. We did a contract with our AWS, currently AWS Partner Socrata, to open up the data. So that was kind of the beginning of the Open Data Movement, and eventually, I left the city, I went work for Cisco, and the city government continued to kind of build on top of Socrata. And they build what they called the Windy Grid, which is basically bringing all of their various sets of data, so 311, code violations, inspections, crime, traffic, and they built an internal data analytics engine. So now, agencies can use that data. And now, what they did, two years ago, they were one of the City on a Cloud Challenge winners, and they, Uturn Data Solutions is our partner that was the winner of that, and they built Chicago Open Grid. So they basically opened that up on a map-based platform. So now as a citizen of Chicago, I can go on Chicago Open Grid, and I can see which restaurants in, surrounding my area, have failed inspections. Have they failed inspection because of a mice infestation, or was it something very minor, so I can decide whether I want to go to that restaurant or not. I can also look at the crime patterns in my area, I can look at the property values, I can look at the education kind of quality in the schools in my neighborhood. So, we have seen kind of now, and it's all on AWS cloud. >> This open data is interesting to me. Let's take that to another level. That's just the user side of it, there's also a delivery value. I saw use cases in Chicago around Health and Human Services, around being more efficient with either vaccines, or delivery of services based on demographics and other profile, all because of open data. So this brings up a question that comes up a lot, and we're seeing here is a trend, is Amazon Web Services public sector has been really good. Teresa Carlson has done an amazing job leaning on partners to be successful. Meaning it's a collaboration. What's that like in the state and local government? What's the partner landscape look like? What are the benefits for partners to work with AWS? Because it seems obvious to me, it might not be obvious to them. But if they have an innovative idea, whether it's to innovate something on the edge of the network in their business, they can do it, and they can scale with Amazon. What is the real benefits of partnering with AWS? >> You hit a key point on there. Teresa has done a fantastic job in customer management as well as building our partners. Similarly, we have a great leader within the state and local government, Kim Majerus. She leads all of our state and local government business. And her focus is exactly like Teresa: How can we help the customers, and also how can we enable partners to help customers? So I'll give you and example. The City of Louisville in Kentucky. They were a City on a Cloud winner, and they, basically what they're building with a partner of ours, Slingshot, they (laughs) get, I was, I used to be in Traffic Management Authority, back in my days, and we used to do traffic studies. So, basically, they send an intern out with clicker or have those black strips to count the number of cars, and based on that, we can plan whether we want to increase the signal timing on this approach, or we can plan the detours if we close the street, what's the, and it's all manual. It used to take, cost us anywhere from 10 to 50 thousand dollars, every traffic study. So what Louisville did with Slingshot is they got the free Waze data that they get gives all of the raw traffic information. Slingshot brought that on to a AWS platform, and now they are building a traffic analysis tool, which now you can do like a snap of a finger, get the analysis and you can manage the signal-approach timing. The cool thing about this is, they're building it in open source code. And the code's available on GitHub, and I was talking to the Chief Data Officer of Louisville, who's actually going to be speaking at this event later today. 12 other cities have already looked into this. They've started to download the code, and they are starting to use it. So, collaboration through partners also enables collaboration amongst all of our customers. >> And also, I'd just point out, that's a great example, love that, and that's new for me to hear that. But also, to me the observation is, it's new data. So being able to be responsive, to look at that opportunity. Now, it used to be in the old world, and I'm sure you can attest to this, being a CIO back in the day, is okay, just say there's new data available, you have to provision IT. >> Oh my God, yeah. >> I mean, what, old way, new way. I mean, compare and contrast the time it would take to do that with what you can do today. >> It's a big, huge difference. I'll tell you as the CIO for the State of Illinois, when I started in early 2015, in my first performance management session, I asked my Infrastructure Management Team to give me the average days it takes to build a server, 49 days. I mean, you're talking seven weeks or maybe, if you talk, 10 business weeks. It's not acceptable. I mean the way the pace of innovation is going, with AWS on cloud, you are talking about minutes you can spin up that server. And that's what we are seeing, a significant change, and that's why Louisville-- >> And I think you got to think it's even worse when you think about integration, personnel requirements, the meetings that have to get involved. It's a nightmare. Okay, so obviously cloud, we know cloud, we love cloud, we use cloud ourselves. So I got to ask you this could, City in a Cloud program, which we've covered in the past, so last year had some really powerful winners. This has been a very successful program. You're involved in it, you have unique insights, you've been on both sides of the table. How is that going? How is it inspiring other cities? What's the camaraderie like? What's the peer review? Is there a peer, is there a network building? How is that spreading? >> That is actually enabling collaboration in a significant manner. Because, you know, you are openly telling what you want to do, and then you are doing that. Everybody is watching you. Like Louisville is a perfect example where they built this, they're building this, and they're going to share it through open source code to all the cities. 12 is just the beginning. I'd not be surprised if there are 120 cities that are going to do this. Because who doesn't want to save two hundred, three hundred thousand dollars a year? And also lots of time to do the traffic studies. Same thing we have seen with, as Virginia Beach is building their Early Flood Warning System. There are other cities who are looking into, like how do we, New Orleans? And others are looking at, "How do we take what Virginia Beach has built? "And how can we use it for us?" And yesterday, they announced this year of the winners that includes Las Vegas, that includes LA Information Technology Department, that includes the City of Philadelphia, and I've been in conversations with all of the CIOs, CDOs, and the leaders of these agencies. The other thing, John, I have seen is, there's a phenomenal leadership that's out there right now in the cities and states that they want to innovate, they want to collaborate, and they want to kind of make a big difference. >> Hold on, hold on, so one more question, this is a really good question, want to get, follow-up on that. But this, what you're talking about to me signifies really the big trend going on right now in this modern era. You've got large cloud scale. You have open source, open sharing, and collaboration happening. This is the new network effect. This is the flywheel. This is uniquely different. This kind of categorizes cloud. And this wasn't available when IT systems and processes were built, 20, 30 years ago. I mean, this is the big shift, you, I mean do you agree? >> Absolutely, this is the big shift, the availability of the cloud, the ubiquitous nature of mobile platform that people have. The newer way of, like, the natural language processing, use of Alexa is becoming so prevalent in government. I mean, in City of Chicago, 50% of the 311 calls that we used to get in 2010, 3 1/2 million of those were informational in nature. If I could offload that on to my Alexa Skills, I can free up my workforce, the 311 call-takers, to do much better, higher-level, you know, call-taking, as opposed to this. So you're absolutely right. I've seen the trends we are seeing is, there is lots of collaboration going on between the governments and partners. I'm also seeing the governments are going at modernization from different points based on their pain points. And I'm also seeing a definite acceleration in modernization. Government, because the technology, AWS, the cloud, our services that we are seeing. And the pace of innovation that AWS brings is also enabling the acceleration in governments. >> Yeah, to help put a point on the, on the conversation here, there's been for years discussion about, "Well, what is the changing role of the CIO?" You've sat on that side of the table, you know, worked with lots of COs, what do you see is the role of the future for the CIO when, specifically when you talk state and local governments? >> I would say CIO is the kind of has to be an enabler of government services. Because if I go back to my city days and working with a mayor, or my state days, working with a governor, at the end of the day, the governor or the mayor is looking at creating better quality of life, providing better health, better education, better safety, et cetera. And CIO is kind of the key partner in that metrics to enable what the governor, what the mayor, the agency directors want to do. And because now data enables the CIO to kind of quickly give solutions, or AI services, Alexa and Polly and Rekog ... All of these things give you, give me as a CIO, ability to provide quick wins to the mayor, to the governor, and also very visible wins. We are seeing that, you know, CIO is becoming a uniquely positioned individual and leader to kind of enable the government. >> All right, thanks so much for comin' on theCUBE. Love the insight, love to follow up. You bring a great perspective and great insight and Amazon's lucky to have you on the team. Lot of great stuff goin' on in the cities and local governments. It's a good opportunity for you guys. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> It's theCUBE live here in Washington DC for AWS, Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, again second year of live coverage. It's a packed house, a lot of great cloud action. Again, the game has changed. It's a whole new world, cloud scale, open source, collaboration, mobile, all this new data's here. This is the opportunity, this is what theCUBE's doing. We're doin' our part, sharing the data with you. Stay with us, more coverage from day two, here in Washington, after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Moscone Center, it's theCUBE covering AWS Summit San Francisco, 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. (techy music playing) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost Jeff Frick, and this is theCUBE's live coverage of AWS Summit San Francisco. We are thrilled to welcome back to the program Sandy Carter, who's a vice president with Amazon Web Services. Been with the company about a year. We've had you on the program many times, but first time since you've been at AWS, so... >> That's right, I'm celebrating my year yesterday with Amazon Web Services. >> Stu: And no cake, all right. >> I had a cake yesterday, actually, cake and champagne, by the way. (laughing) >> Sandy, we always love to hear, you know, you talk to so many customers, you know, bring us back for a little bit. What brought you to AWS, what's exciting to your customers when you're talking to them today? >> Well, you know, I really love innovation, I love being innovative, and you know, bar none Amazon is the most innovative company out there today, but really what brought me to Amazon was their focus on the customer, really "obsession" on the customer. When they say obsession they really mean obsession. They work backwards from the customer. We really have this big, big thrust. In fact, one of my favorite stories is when I first came to Amazon we'd be in these meetings and people would say, "Well, what does Low Flying Hawk think about this," or "What does Low Flying Hawk think about that," and I was like, "Who is Low Flying Hawk?" Well, he's a person who would give comments on a forum and just a person who wasn't even spending millions of dollars with Amazon but just had a lot of big clout. We actually just opened a building named Low Flying Hawk, believe it or not. >> Jeff: Have you identified this person? >> They do know who he is, yes. (laughing) But it's really, it just symbolizes the focus that Amazon has on the customer and why that's so important. >> And Sandy, at re:Invent you actually, you spoke to the analyst, I was listening to the session. It's not just kind of, people think AWS they think public cloud. You work for Amazon, it's everything kind of across what you think of Amazon.com, AWS, everything from drones and using Kindles and everything like that. Can you give us a little bit of kind of that pan view of how Amazon looks at innovation? >> Yeah, so it's really interesting. Amazon is very methodical in the way that we innovate, and what we do is we really try to understand the customer. We work backwards from the customer, so we do a press release first, we do frequently asked questions next, and then we do a narrative-- >> You're saying you do an internal press release, yes, yes. >> Yeah, internal press release. Internal frequently asked questions, and then we review a six-page document, no PowerPoints whatsoever, which enables us to debate and learn from each other and just iterate on the idea that makes it better and better and better so that when we come out with it it's a really powerful idea and powerful concept, something that the customers really want. >> So, we'll ask you what you're doing now, but one more kind of transition question, what was your biggest surprise? You know, there's a lot of kind of mystery from people on the outside looking in in terms of culture, and we know it's car driving and innovative growing like crazy company, not only in business but in terms of people. What was your biggest surprise once you kind of got on the inside door? >> My biggest surprise was just how incredibly encouraging and supportive the team is at AWS. My boss is Matt Garman, he's been supportive since day one, you know, Andy, they just cheer you on. They want you to do well and I've really never been at a company that everybody's really pulling for you to be successful, not political infighting but really pulling for you to be successful. So, that's really was the biggest surprise to me, and then that customer obsession. Like, it's not customer focus, it really is customer obsession. >> Right, I think it's so well illustrated by the, again not AWS, but Amazon with the store, right, with no cash register, no people. >> Sandy: Amazon Go. >> To think about that-- >> Sandy: Yeah. >> From the customer point of view is nobody likes to stand in line at the grocery store, so it's such a clean illustration of a customer centric way to attack the problem. >> And I love that because what we did is we opened up the beta first for employees, so we would go in and play with it and test it out, and then we opened it up in Seattle and we would give customer tours. Now it's open to the public in Seattle, so it just again shows you that iterative process that Amazon uses and it's super cool, have you guys been? >> Jeff: Have not been. >> Ugh, in fact, my daughter went in. She put on a mask, she was going to fool the system but it wasn't fooled. All the ML and all the AI worked brilliantly. >> I love how everyone loves to get so creative and try to, you know, get through the system, right, try to break the system. >> I know, but my daughter, that's what I would figure for sure. (laughing) >> So, what are you working on now? You've been there a year, what are you working on? >> So, we are innovating around the enterprise workload, so we know that a lot of startups and cloud native companies have moved to the cloud, but we're still seeing a lot of enterprises that are trying to figure out what their strategy is, and so, Stu and Jeff, what I've been working on is how do we help enterprises in the best way possible. How can we innovate to get them migrated over as fast as possible? So for instance, we have Windows that runs on AWS. It's actually been running there longer than with any other vendor and we have amazing performance, amazing reliability. We just released an ML, machine learning OMI for Windows so that you can use and leverage all that great Windows support and applications that you have, and then you guys saw earlier I was talking to VMware. We know that a lot of customers want to do hybrid cloud on their journey to going all-in with the cloud, and so we formed this great partnership with VMware, produced an offering called VMware Cloud on AWS and we're seeing great traction there. Like Scribd's network just talked about how they're using it for disaster recovery. Other customers are using it to migrate. One CIO migrated 143 workloads in a weekend using that solution. So, it just helps them to get to that hybrid state before they go all-in on the cloud. >> So, are they, I was going to say, are they building a mirror instance of what their on-prem VMware stack is in the Amazon version? Is that how they're kind of negotiating that transition or how does that work? >> So, with VMware they don't have to refactor, so they can just go straight over. With Microsoft workloads what we're seeing a lot of times is maybe they'll bring a sequel app over and they'll just do a lift and shift, and then once they feel comfortable with the cloud they'll go to Aurora, which as you've found was the fastest growing service that AWS has ever had, and so we see a lot of that, you know, movement. Bring it over, lift and shift, learning and you know, if you think about it, if you're a large enterprise one of your big challenges is how do I get my people trained, how do I get them up to speed, and so we've done... Like, we've got a full dot net stack that runs on AWS, so their people don't even have to learn a new language. They can develop in Visual Studio and use PowerShell but work on AWS and bring that over. >> You know, Sandy, bring us inside your customers because the challenge for most enterprises is they have so many applications. >> Sandy: Yeah. >> And you mentioned lift and shift. >> Sandy: Yeah. >> You know, I know some consultant's out there like, "Lift and shift is horrible, don't do it." It's like, well, there's some things you'll build new in the cloud, there's some things you'll do a little bit, and there's some stuff today lift and shift makes sense and then down the road I might, you know, move and I've seen, you know, it was like the seven Rs that Amazon has as to do you re-platform, refactor-- >> That's right. >> You know, all that and everything, so I mean, there's many paths to get there. What are some of the patterns you're hearing from customers? How do they, how is it easier for them to kind of move forward and not get stuck? >> Well, we're seeing a lot of data center evacuations, so those tend to be really fast movement and that's typically-- >> Jeff: Data center evacuation-- >> Yeah, that's what-- >> I haven't heard that one. >> Yeah, that's what, evacuation, they've got to get out of their data center buyer for a certain date for whatever reason, right? They had a flood or a corporate mandate or something going on, and so we are seeing those and those are, Stu, like lift and shift quickly. We are seeing a lot of customers who will create new applications using containers and serverless that we talked about today a lot, and that's really around the innovative, new stuff that they're doing, right. So, Just Eat, for instance, is a large... They do online food service out of the UK. I love their solution because what they're doing is they're using Alexa to now order food, so you can say, "Alexa, I want a pizza delivered "in 20 minutes, what's the best pizza place "that I can get in 20 minutes?" Or "I want sushi tonight," and Alexa will come back and say, "Well, it's going to take "an hour and a half, you had sushi two days ago. "Maybe you want to do Thai food tonight." (laughing) And so it's really incredible, and then they even innovated and they're using Amazon Fire for group ordering. So, if there's a big football game or something going on they'll use Amazon Fire to do that group ordering. All that is coming in through Alexa, but the back end is still Windows on AWS. So, I love the fact that they're creating these new apps but they're using some of that lift and shift to get the data and the training and all that moving and grooving, too. >> Yeah, what do you, from the training standpoint, how, you know, ready are customers to retrain their people, you know, where are there shortages of skillsets, and how's Amazon, you know, helping in that whole movement? >> Well, training is essential because you've got so many great people at enterprises who have these great skills, so what we see a lot of people doing is leveraging things like dot net on AWS. So, they actually... They have something they know, dot net, but yet they're learning about the cloud, and so we're helping them do that training as they're going along but they still have something very familiar. Folks like Capital One did a huge training effort. They trained 1,000 people in a year on cloud. They did deep dives with a Tiger Team on cloud to get them really into the architecture and really understanding what was going on, so they could leverage all those great skills that they had in IT. So, we're seeing everything from, "I got to use some of the current tools that I have," to "Let me completely move to something new." >> And how have you, you've been in the Bay Area also for about a year, right, if I recall? >> Actually, I just moved, I moved to Seattle. >> Jeff: Oh, you did make the move, I was going to say-- >> I did. (laughing) >> "So, are they going to make you move up north?" >> I did because I was-- >> You timed it in the spring, not in November? >> I did, there you go. (laughing) When it's nice and sunny, but it's great. >> Exactly. >> It's great to live in Seattle. Amazon has such a culture that is in person, you know, so many people work there. It's really exhilarating to go into the office and brainstorm and whiteboard with people right there, and then our EBCs are there, so our executive briefing center is there, so customers come in all the time because they want to go see Amazon Go, and so it's really an exciting, energizing place to be. >> Yeah, I love the line that Warner used this morning is that AWS customers are builders and they have a bias for action. So, how do you help customers kind of translate some of the, you know, the culture that Amazon's living and kind of acting like a startup for such a large company into kind of the enterprise mindset? >> That's a great question, so we just proposed this digital innovation workshop. We are doing this now with customers. So, we're teaching them how to work backwards from the customer, how to really understand what a customer need is and how to make sure they're not biased when they're getting that customer need coming in. How to do, build an empathy map and how to write that press release, that internal press release and think differently. So, we're actually teaching customers to do it. It's one of our hottest areas today. When customers do that they commit to doing a proof of concept with us on AWS on one of the new, innovative ideas. So, we've seen a lot of great and exciting innovation coming out of that. >> All right, well, Sandy Carter, so glad we could catch up with you again. Thanks for bringing discussion of innovation, what's happening in the enterprise customers to our audience. For Jeff Frick, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back will lots more coverage here, you're watching theCUBE. (techy music playing)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco's DevNet Create here in Mountain View in the heart of Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier, my co-cost, Lauren Cooney, our next guest is Susie Wee, is vice president and CTO of Cisco DevNet. This is her event, DevNet is a Cisco's developer team, conference, community, DevNet created a cloud native, much more dev ops oriented. Our second year covering it, it's only a year and a half old. The creator with her team, Susie, great to have you back. >> Great, it's great to be back. >> What a success, again. You guys are learning, we heard from the keynote that you made some changes, heard some feedback, you added more cooler elements. But this is about technology enablement tools, education, and then fun, and having people exchange information. How's it going? What's the upkeep? >> It's going great. So we're really excited to have our second DevNet Create, and what happened was last year, what we've always tried to do with DevNet overall is to make sure that we had hands-on material because people want to code, people want to learn about the newest technologies. We also made sure that the content of the first DevNet Create was from Cisco, but also from the leading players in the community. And so we got feedback from last year on how to improve it for this year, and basically they just wanted more hands on, and so we've actually expanded from having three parallel workshops to eight parallel workshops, where just folks can get hands-on and code. We continued to have both Cisco content as well as community content from leaders in the field. When we got feedback last year, what happened was we were collecting the feedback. The people who responded, we asked a few questions, and we said: Did you feel that this was useful for you? Did you feel that you were learning about modern tools and technologies that would help you in your career? Would you come back again? The strangest thing that happened is like 100% of people said that they were learning about topics that are modern and they need for their careers. And 100% of them said they would come back again. And I'm like, is it still 100%? 'Cause one person says no, it's not 100%. And so to everyone that responded, they wanted to come back, so we just gave them more of what they wanted. >> It's great, it feels great. You've got a good vibe, but I think there's some real interesting things. We talked last time about how the cloud native world connecting with the commercial liability of Cisco. Cisco is not a small company, they invented routing as we know it, they connect the Internet, and you had that kind of ops networking culture with this new programmable Internet kind of coming together, so there's some notable news you guys had here, why I was impressed by. One is these business exchange, or business ecosystem. Talk about some of the things that you guys are doing now as a result of these two worlds coming together. It's not just speeds that feed tech goodness, just like business value. Money making! >> (laughing) Just to go a little bit more into that, what happens is you kind of have your world of infrastructure, and you have developers who are writing cloud apps, it's so easy to deploy, and really get a lot of value out there. But then you have the world of real companies, real data, real existing infrastructure, enterprise data, smart cities that you want to bring online and everything there, and there's a new type of app that's come to play, and there's a new type of app that of course, needs to work in the cloud, but also needs to couple in with the real world and physical things, and enterprise data. And so that brings rise to a whole new set of applications and new ways to do business. So in terms of what we're doing with that, as someone writes this kind of an app, it's not easy, just like download it onto my phone. It's actually, how do I couple that with the location based infrastructure? How do I couple that with enterprise and hybrid cloud data? And so what we have now is a business exchange, an ecosystem exchange where we can bring those applications up, where if someone is using Cisco infrastructure, we have partners around the world who install and manage solutions that they put for their customers. And we want to show them these are the applications that work together with those products. These are the solutions that you can deliver, so we want to take the applications that our developers are writing and make it available to our partners, to let them use our go to market that we have around the world. >> We get the technical developer ecosystem, and you have the business ecosystem, so that's an indicator that there's some movement and growth. Where is it coming from? Where are you seeing the highlights here? >> Yeah, so in terms of the movement and growth, what happens is we're concentrated on technical enablement for the first few years of DevNet. But clearly, the reason to do the technical enablement is to do that business pull through. Where do we see the growth? So, what happens is everyone in the world wants to digitize, right? So people want to take their manufacturing lines, they want to digitize them. People who have cities want to offer newer experiences that are still kind of leveraging the old, but then providing a top-notch experience for that. So we have people that are in cities who want to use our infrastructure, but also have innovative applications to give to their folks. We have partners around the world who want to not only provide infrastructure, but to provide interesting solutions and experiences. So it's really interesting to see the hunger and the desire now for people to use applications in all different ways, and we're trying to really package it up for them. >> So you're actually stitching these applications together and then packaging them up for consumption for the solution? Is that what you're looking at? >> Yeah, because everybody's buying. Everybody needs a network, everybody has something that exists, but they want to go above it. That boundary between applications and infrastructure is kind of blurring, right? And what an application can do when it's really coupled in to an infrastructure with APIs is completely new, and they want to play, they want to innovate. They don't want to just do the same old thing, and they want to kind of unleash the power, get the value from all of the application development that's going on. >> I think that's great. One of the things I saw from the keynote was the numbers in terms of your exponential growth over the past four years and also the number of folks who continuously visit the site. I think that's awesome. Can you kind of give folks that are looking to build communities any tips or tricks? >> Yeah, and actually, Lauren, you were with us early on. You saw when I was begging for Cisco to have a developer community, and so we didn't have any members at that time. But yeah, we've grown to 480,000, actually 485,000 registered developers. We have 60,000 active monthly users. >> Lauren: That's great. >> So they are really doing stuff. But yeah, in terms of what it takes to grow that community, I think really the key is that my incentive, my goals, my mission, which I shared, is that we want to make developers successful. We want to make our partners in that broader ecosystem and our customers successful. It's not actually my job to sell products. Obviously any solution that's written around APIs for a product will sell products, but my job is to make the ecosystem successful. So I think the key is just constantly keeping their best interest at heart, and having a model where obviously it will pull through the right business for Cisco. >> You've got great self-awareness, and I think that's important to understand what they're trying to do, but also you bring a lot to the table. Cisco has massive presence and enterprises in businesses, whether it's service providers, down to the small medium enterprise to large enterprises. As you look across Cisco, you bring the goods to the party, so to speak. How do you balance that, and what's your approach? So you're taking more of the programmable net ops, which I love, by the way, we talked about that in Barcelona at Cisco Live. You can bring a lot to the table, but you don't want to firehose the developers with all this Cisco stuff. How are you blending that together? What's your approach? >> This is a great point. So what we have to do is we have to understand who our audience is, and we need to bring the right material and speak the language for that audience. And to give you an example, is that we've had you at DevNet Create, we've had you at the DevNet Zones at Cisco Live. When we go to Cisco Live and we have our developer conferences, that is the group in the audience that knows Cisco. They're getting certified, they know how to deploy infrastructure, it's a tremendous community. We have millions of people around the world who basically run, deploy, manage these solutions. >> John: Over years of experience, too. >> Oh, decades of experience, yes, and certification, mastery, expertise. >> They're the network nerds. >> They are the network nerds! (laughs) >> Moving packets around, but now it's changed. >> And the way that we talk to them is different, because what we present to them is how can you automate your infrastructure? How can you scale and use the newest tools? How can you get observability and insights from that infrastructure itself? And then, here's the software tools that you need to use, and here's the APIs you need to know about. Let us understand your problems, and let's work on this together. Now, the types of platforms that we expose and the APIs will be for networking, it'll be for security, it will be for compute, it'll be in many of these areas. Then we come over to DevNet Create, and what we had to do was create a separate venue to hit app developers, cloud native developers, they're not going to Cisco Live. They're actually going to developer conferences, they're in the Bay Area, they're all around the world. They don't think of Cisco or even of infrastructure in what they do, necessarily. >> It's a different culture. >> It's a different culture. And we actually had to re-jigger our vocabulary, we had to re-jigger what we present to them, because when they think of IOS, they don't think of a network operating system, Cisco's iOS operating system, they think of a mobile operating system. So we've actually had to even retrain ourselves to show this is the value that we provide to application developers, here's the platforms and the APIs that matter to you. Here's the right level of abstraction of what would be relevant to an app developer, and really speak to them. And DevNet Create is a separate venue created for that reason. >> And timing is everything, as we know. The wind's at your back because you've got Kubernetes, the container madness, the standardization of contains, which is not new, the Google guy was on earlier talking about containers. You've got micro services, you've got Istio, which is where you're partnering with Google, so this is a new, real emerging tech area that's a nice glue layer between the cultures. How are you handling that? Do you agree? >> Oh my goodness. >> What's your focus on? >> Yes, it's so amazing. So the whole world's in containers and micro services, is shifting how applications are developed. We actually used it within our own system, where we wanted to use the newest technologies, we saw the benefits of working in container and microservices based architecture, to not write monolithic apps but to really be able to compose and reuse services. So we had to go through that change, but what we saw is that when you're dealing with enterprise data, confidential data, customer data, and then public cloud data and everything there, there's a lot of thinking about how to write a cloud app that is a hybrid cloud app that uses OnPrim and public cloud and the best of both worlds. And the world of containers is interesting because suddenly it's the performance of your application, it depends even more on the network. Getting security of how your containers are built up, how they're connected, how they're spinning up in different places, you need that consistency. So having the whole tool of how do you now deploy containers on OnPrim resources as well as public cloud based resources is tricky, and you need to build in that security into the infrastructure itself, and then provide the right abstraction for the developers with tools like Istio. So we're partnered up with Google. It's been a fantastic collaboration where we start with Google's leadership in just cloud native development and what they have to do to scale, and then take together the problems and the opportunities of real enterprises, of real cities, and things there. And as Allen said this morning, it's complicated. It's not that easy. There's a whole new set of problems that we need to deal with, and this partnership is amazing at putting that together. >> Makes the network more important. >> Makes the network more important, yes. >> Awesome, so now talk about what you're doing for incentives. Obviously, you've got a great posture to the marketplace, love how you're doing it, you're bringing two worlds together, bringing a lot to the table, but now you've got to keep people motivated and keep them incentives. Couple things you announced on stage, DevNet Solutions Plus, which is much more curated set of approved rockstar developers or apps that can get on a price list. That's like a lottery ticket. It's like the golden ticket for a developer. There's real value there, right? You can't invite everybody, but you got to do some QAing, but talk about some of these incentive programs you have. >> Absolutely. So what happens is once again, a company like Cisco has an entire community and ecosystem of people and places of infrastructure around the world, and they're looking to differentiate, they're looking to have interesting offerings as well. They're very relevant, because an app developer today needs to figure out how can they make money, how can they take all of everything they've invested in software and bring it to a business value. And so what we're doing is actually coupling that app developer with the entire Cisco channel and the Cisco partners that are out there, and then letting their applications come forward. So when you get something onto... The way that it works is that Cisco has its price list, partners around the world can create solutions that they deliver with those products. But in addition to Cisco's products, what we can do is put on a software and ISV's products onto there, and we're adding it on to the Cisco price list. It's a whole new type of app store. (laughs) But it's another way to go to market to get into these places. >> You're seeing some early returns in terms of the types of ISVs that are coming into the tables, or pattern to the match, or see more network-centric? Who are some of the kinds of developers? What's the make up look like? >> Yeah, so it's really a combination. So what happens is there's the set of applications that are built on infrastructure, surprisingly. So it builds on a collaboration, or a unified communication infrastructure, things that are built on a UCS, like a compute infrastructure. Things that need the network in a mission critical way. So like trading applications, right? You need that network to work, the performance of the application needs to be coupled, so then people tend to buy a kit of here's the software, here's the hardware that makes it all work, I'm buying infrastructure, I want to buy these together. And so it's really kind of putting that bundle of value together and then letting that sell. And I talked to our partners around the world, it's an amazing ecosystem. And when they can actually connect to the world of software developers and this ecosystem in a way that it helps them differentiate their business, it helps bring the app developer money and a business opportunity. It's a whole new level of scale. It's incredible. >> You'll be pushing video apps on there, too. >> Susie: Absolutely. >> CUBE videos. >> CUBE videos, there we go. (laughing) Absolutely. >> Interesting times. Awesome. Anything you want to add? >> Yeah, definitely. One of the things I was wondering about is that with this whole app ecosystem and the partners and the things along those lines, what are the apps that you're seeing that you actually never expected to see? >> Well, some are ones that we actually did expect, or we hoped for them, but the fact that they're coming through is another case. There's a set of applications that are built, for example, around contact centers. Contact centers are customer care, it's the way that people are interacting, right? And there's a whole kind of communications infrastructure around that, it's how people are answering phones, offering services, knowing what to do, so how you build those solutions together. There's a set of healthcare applications, so when you're going into healthcare, your patient monitoring devices versus your guest Wi-Fi services are different, so the kinds of solutions that you can provide there are key. There's actually a great thing in terms of indoor location based services. So we have Meraki and CMX where your Wi-Fi infrastructure not only provides wireless connectivity but gives you indoor location proximity. There's actually a company here called Map Wise, which has built kind of a wayfinding application on top. When I was at Web Summit, then they had Cisco infrastructure for putting up the conference, then they had their application to help people navigate throughout the conference, and they came in, and I actually spoke to Matthew, who's here, and he was like yeah, I had to learn because I had to go in early. They had to set up the network, and then I'm a software guy, I had to get my app to work on that network. I hadn't really thought about how to do that before. Right, so you're starting to couple these apps into that. >> Stu: New use cases. >> These are new use cases, and so much value. >> Yeah, and it's good that you get the terminology, it's a language issue, right? So you got to get the languages nailed down. All right, final question for you. What's the bumper sticker here? What's the phrase? I heard you on stage, create, connect, secure. What's the current DevNet Create tagline? >> So it is: Connect to Create. And so in one port, it was about connecting the world, providing that connection, and that's what we've done over the last 25 years. And over the next 25, even more things will be connected, but it's really about the solutions that we can build together as a team, and there's an ecosystem now that you have APIs that are exposed. You can build machine learning, and artificial intelligence together with world leading connectivity, together with world leading cloud companies. And when you bring all those together, you can have entirely new types of experiences that we can do, so it's Connect to Create. Along with that, actually comes the need for security and protection, and so that fabric needs to not only connect to create, but also connect and protect to create. And we think that by building that into the infrastructure as well, we can help app developers to secure their customers' data and to secure their users themselves, access, and all sorts of things. >> I love the concept of co-creation, really great collaboration model, and you guys are doing a great job. Congratulations on driving this developer program, and programs now, from a handful of renegades, now to a big organization, or growing organization. >> We're still lean, but our pack is growing. (laughing) >> You don't got to be a rocket scientist to know they're going to be doubling down on this. Cisco, cracking the code on the developer forum about learning the languages, knowing how to lead into the right cultures and bring them together, and have the right technology, enablement, and Susie, the creator, a part of the team, member of Cisco team for DevNet. Thanks for coming on and sharing, appreciate it. >> Susie: Thank you so much. >> Be right back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)